a blog on programming languages and other stuff…

Is VB 2005 buggy?

I haven’t played with VB.Net 2005, but are all of the bugs also causing problems? Most seem CLR related, but with a hint of IDE link, and I know C# and VB.Net don’t share all the IDE code.

The list of reported issues has put a halt, possibly permenantly, on my push to upgrade the entire team to 2005.

I’m guessing Karl is talking about a lot of the blog entries that came out around the release of VS 2005 to MSDN subscribers, some of which are summarizedby MiniMSFT.

So, is VB 2005 a buggy piece of crap? In a word, no. Although I have not been intimately involved with bug triage for quite some time, I do know that we’ve spent a very long time working very hard to ensure that VB 2005 (and VS 2005) is a solid, quality release. My own personal experience with it is that it’s very stable and so far I don’t see a groundswell of complaints that would indicate serious problems.

When, then, to make of the brouhaha? Well, first we should be clear: VS 2005 shipped with bugs. This happened for two reasons. One, as has been discussed elsewhere, the only way to “converge” on a release is to steadily raise the bar for the severity of bugs that you’re going to accept fixes for in the product. This is because every bug fix, no matter how benign, has the possibility to uncover or cause more bugs. Ergo, the only way to reach a steady state is to stop fixing most bugs. Some bugs, I should be clear, are always going to be fixed if found before shipping — if we product incorrect code, for example. But others can be postponed. And this is how it’s worked for pretty much every product you’ve ever bought from Microsoft (or any other vendor, for that matter, I would guess).

The other reason VB 2005 shipped with bugs is that I know that there are bugs we didn’t find. Again, Whidbey was a pretty long release cycle, so we had plenty of opportunities to flush out problems. But no matter how hard we look, there are always bugs that slip through. We could spend years in beta and still would find serious problems after we ship. It’s a fact of life given the myraid of different ways that our products can be used.

OK, so what about the reports of bugs bouncing around the blogsphere? Like I said, it’s inevitable we shipped with bugs so I’m not surprised that, given the high level of sophistication of the most prolific bloggers, a few things are going to show up right away. Murphy’s Law in action. However, as I also said, I’m not seeing the volume that would indicate significant problems. Instead, it’s a handful of reports that have then been bouncing madly around the echo chamber of the web. This doesn’t mean that the bugs that have been verified aren’t real or aren’t serious — any bug that impacts a customer is a serious problem and one that will need to be addressed — just that the preponderance of the evidence so far is that we’ve got a solid release. Time, of course, will tell. I encourage anyone who’s worried about the stability of the release to: a) give it a bit of time and see what the consensus is after people have had a few months to live with the release, and b) try it out yourself and see what you think, either by using the trial version or the Express version (see here for links to those).

All this is deja vu for me, I might add. The very first product I shipped at Microsoft was Access 1.0. It was a great product and a solid piece of engineering. However, we had a slight mishap — during the launch event at Comdex, Bill Gates was up on stage with someone (forget who) doing a demo of the great features of Access 1.0. Everything was going great and then suddenly WHAM! Access crashed. (Thankfully, I was in the second wave of team members to go down to Comdex, so I only heard about it. Half the team had to sit in the audience and just watch the whole thing unfold.) This wasn’t great, but in theory it wasn’t the end of the world — after all, it was just one crash. However, Phillipe Kahn, whose product Paradox for Windows we had just beaten to market by (I think) a good six months, saw an opening and started going on about how people shouldn’t buy Access because it was “too buggy.” Was this true? No. Did it matter? Not really. The perception stuck and was part of the reason that we shipped a 1.1 version, so people would think that we fixed all those nasty bugs that weren’t really there. (Of course, in the long run, Access did just fine.)

Post navigation

55 thoughts on “Is VB 2005 buggy?”

It wasn’t my intention to hint that any of the 2005 were "pieces of crap" (and I know you weren’t saying that). My question (which, reading over doesn’t make too much sense) wasn’t inflammatory in nature. I’m genuinely interested in knowing if the mostly-C# code samples of bugs are also there in VB.Net.

I agree with everything you’ve said. In fairness, a few of the handful of bugs are very severe. I think the big problem, which mini nailed (though he wasn’t the first), is that the service pack history (which you and I talked about at TechEd) is what really worried people. Were we gonna have to wait `til Orcas? I realize this issue has been cleared up (at least enough to satisfy most people with genuine concerns, as opposed to troublemakers).

In retrospect, I guess my question is, what bugs are gonna get fixed in VB.Net for the service pack. But I know you don’t have a clue ?

Karl: Yup, I was using your comment as a jumping-off point for something I was intending to write about anyway, so your comment got kind of caught up in all that. Didn’t mean to paint you as an extremist in any way. 🙂 I also see I didn’t answer your question — to my knowledge, none of the C# bugs are in VB (which isn’t to say that someone won’t find some in VB, just they’re likely not to be the same).

And yup on the Service Pack question. I realize that’s been very frustrating for people… As to what’s going to be in it, I don’t know that there are any that are automatically in there yet, but I’m sure we’re going to be collecting them as we go along…

As for who’s MiniMSFT, I have no clue. I’m not even sure exactly where in MSFT s/he works, although I’ve been trying to figure that out based on what they say…

IMO vs.net 2005 is by far the worst MS product I’ve used since 1991 in terms of stability and speed. BY FAR. Really nothing to be proud of and nothing like "of course every product ships with some bugs". It’s almost like Linux user experience but way slower. Regards !

I understand that VS 2005 has a long release cycle, but compare it to Google’s’ Gmail. It’s been in beta for a couple of years now. The number of beta users is steadily increasing and the numbers of defects are going down. I suspect that when it launches it will be an extremely stable product. I don’t think you’ll find many people at Google saying that, "Yes, there are bugs but we’re not going to fix them so we can have a ‘stable’ release." Is this the mentality that has earned Microsoft a reputation of putting profits before quality?

As the ‘service wars’ heat up who will be the winner, first to market or the better quality product?

I can only say that the many defects in VS 2003 has caused me a lot of frustration and at $700-800 a license I believe a better product was in order.

Also, gmail is so popular and the "beta" so open, that "beta" is now more of an excuse for any bugs that do come out than anything else.

"Beta" to google means, "Sorry folks, we underestimated the costs of 2gb email accounts, we’ve brought the limit to 10megs, this is a BETA product after all!". They used it more as a legal word than anything else

Your comment on Phillipe Kahn’s remarks about Access 1.0 being buggy are interesting in this cotext. The Cirrus beta lasted so long, I wrote a Windows 3.1 multimedia book while waiting for the drops needed to finish "Using Microsoft Access for Windows."

OpenOffice 2.0’s Base product appears to me to suffer from the "don’t fix it; ship it" mentality. There’s more about OpenOffice Base vs. Access 9 and later at

Paul, I am very happy that you shipped Visual Basic 2005. I have been using the product intensively for months, and I must agree that despite the bugs that are still present in RTM, it is the best Visual Basic ever. So, I won’t claim it to be a piece of crap nor the end of the world. Let’s talk constructively. I have put a link to a shot post in my blog. There I describe some bugs I have found. Some of them I already reported to MSDN Feedback, and some I plan to report in the near future. Most interesting is the one in which the Visual Basic background compiler starts crashing and keeps crashing every second until I kill the IDE process. It happens several times a day at my office, however, I still have not found a precise sequence of repro steps.

While I can sympathise with the post above by Ovi, I guess my real question has to be something like "Did VS 2005 ship because it *had* to ship during 2005 (you know, the name thing) or did it ship because it was *ready* to be used by a population of programmers who rely on it to make a living?"

Shipping during 2005 to make the name thing work out, with the understanding that future service packs will catch up, is IMHO, pretty much a slap in the face to the developer community who depend on MS products and technology.

If MS cannot decide when a product is ready to release (as opposed to being ready to meet a marketing campaign) maybe they should re-examine the product development methodology they are using…just a suggestion.

Hate to be the dissenting voice but I actually have found vs.net 2005 to be very usable (we’ve been developing with 2005 since the July CTP). Its no where near as solid as 2003, but the problems are small potatoes. We haven’t had a single IDE crash in our complex, multi-tier application. The benefits in time, speed and simplicity far outweigh any frustrations.

My biggest gripe with MS is that it takes them so long to get new features out to us…I’d be much happier with a 6 month release cycle and only getting 1 or 2 new features than the present 3+1 (3 years to major version (1.0, 2.0) + 1 year to solid service pack (1.1, MC)

>> "Shipping during 2005 to make the name thing work out, with the understanding that future service packs will catch up, is IMHO, pretty much a slap in the face to the developer community who depend on MS products and technology"

Oh come on, it’s not a slap in the face to anyone, it’s just reality. It was a highly-complex release with an unprecidented marriage to SQL Server and unprecidented response to the community including language enhancements that forced changing the Framework and impacting the compiler/IL group at the 11th hour. A long time had gone by since the last release and someone made the decision that November was **IT***. Wrap up your stuff guys, we’re releasing. This happens everywhere at all levels and developers ought to be able to understand that better than anyone.

>> "Shipping during 2005 to make the name thing work out, with the understanding that future service packs will catch up, is IMHO, pretty much a slap in the face to the developer community who depend on MS products and technology"

Oh come on, it’s not a slap in the face to anyone, it’s just reality. It was a highly-complex release with an unprecidented marriage to SQL Server and unprecidented response to the community including language enhancements that forced changing the Framework and impacting the compiler/IL group at the 11th hour. A long time had gone by since the last release and someone made the decision that November was **IT***. Wrap up your stuff guys, we’re releasing. This happens everywhere at all levels and developers ought to be able to understand that better than anyone.

I am actually taken back at how buggy VS 2005 is. It is not just trivial bugs either. There are major problems from compiler lockups. Search/Replace lockups. Some features that just don’t work like the "Make single instance application" that always throws an exception. Memory leaks and just overall bad performance. Some new features look rushed and half complete. This is the first MS release that I have actually seen things I like better in the previous release. Most things are improvements but for some changes I wonder what they wore thinking of. No replacement for Query Analizer. Yes I know it can all be done in Enterprise manager but not as easy. Many things are harder to achieve than before.

To Eric TN: I just have to ask – WHY do you believe that developers should bear the development costs associated with what amounts to extended Beta testing just so that Microsoft can make a marketing promise come true?

IMO FWIW, since Microsoft stands to profit directly from the release, and since this is not some minor or open-source software, it is the responsibility of Microsoft, 100%, to work out the bugs on their own dime, not yours or mine.

No, Eric – Microsoft *chose* to offload those costs to you, me and developers in general for no better reason than to make a ship date. VS 2005 is, in its present condition, a better argument to use something else rather than .NET for your needs and those of your clients.

.NET is still buggy and is still rapidly changing, with new releases breaking code that worked in prior releases. If your goal is stable software to deliver to your customers, better to wait until .NET gets its act together (and I’m sure it will, I just don’t care to guess as to when, therefore how many times I am going to have to develop the same software and then re-write it and debug, debug, debug, etc before that happens! This gets expensive in a real hurry…).

To AM Perry: I have had the same experience that you describe…and I agree about the new "help" system. MS made a point of claiming how much better the new help system would be, but I certainly do not find it so…

Diego: Thanks for being so civil; I have seen answers similar to yours posted elsewhere, but with no respect whatever for the opposing point of view (and some are mean-spiritted, as well)! Your approach is welcome!

I have no disagreement with you; your assessment is that .NET currently offers value while mine is a more wait-and-see approach. As I said, I am sure that MS will get the bugs out of this product at some point (historically, this often occurs around Version 3.0+ for MS, so we probably have a ways to go yet) and while I will keep up my reading on the .NET framework, I can not yet afford to develop programs against an as-yet unproven and rapidly changing development environment (I am a small businessman, not a large company, and my resources are limited!).

I wish you well, and hope that your efforts bear you the expected rewards. Right now, this choice is not for me.

While creating my first application with Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition I experience something unusual since the days of Windows 98; The Blue Screen of Death. That’s right. Every so often I would click the "Save" button and be rewarded with the Blue Screen of Death. The online error report blamed a device driver. Funny how It only happens after I click the save button. And it’s not every time. About every tenth time or so.

The common saying of "Wait until the first Service Pack" still rings true for those who want a more stable product.

Cpu maxes out when running the personal website starter kit. Also will just hang during navigation between pages. Eventually you get everything to work at least once so you know that the code is working. I have been using Macromedia IDE’s for years now and if this does not get cleaned up I don’t think I am likely to make the switch any time soon.

Old Guy: We are all developers. Who else should I feel more sympathy for?

I finally submited a bug report to ladybug for the frequent background compiler crashes: FDBK42191.

This seems to happen a lot more often with bad code (code that raises many warnings) than with well written code. Since I worked hard to get my warning count to zero I have been four days without seeing any background compiler crash… Before that I experienced crashes several times a day.

I have built a large application basing all work on Beta 1 & 2 with great success. But now on a clean machine with only the RTM version of VS2005 I can not even get the app to start in debug. The compiler crashes and the experience after that is one crash after another of the compiler while tyring to exit VS.

I can not believe that the code we have written is causing the compiler to crash. Sur, if it wants to give us errors and not let us do something taht is one thing, but to crash and not give a clue what is happening.

Even more confusing is if we just complie the application and run it standalone, it works fine.

We have submitted the bugs we have encountered, but I for one am not impressed with this release version.

I have been trying to find simple repro steps and simple code for it, so I can send it to the IDE team, but it has been very difficult.

Our solution is somewhat big and we have some legacy components that generate many warnings. Things improved a lot since we disabled some warnings and corrected others. Now we have zero warnings and zero compiler crashes. Also, somebody added a an interesting workaround to my bug report. It says that things also improve by disabling edit & continue.

Please, don’t stay there saying you are not impressed, let’s help improve it!

After spending countless hours figuring out a myriad of issues I now have some impressive websites up and running. You guys (Microsoft) need to put a lot more focus on what it takes to actually deploy a web app to a hosting company. With that said this new VS is absolutely the greatest development tool ever. You just have to pay your dues to make it all happen. Great job overall, I especially appreciate the effort put into the starter kits.

In VB6 if a dependent user control was recompiled the environment would ask if you want to upgrade. Also if a form couldn’t load because a control had changed it was replaced by a picturebox which you could delete on the form and go find the correct reference. 2005 (didn’t spend much time with 2003) leaves you with a message telling you to reverse the edit you just made. And the .Net "document" approach to search/replace is bizarre–you never know where you are and edit/undo won’t cross documents! Did anyone at MS in charge of VB.Net have any experience with VB6 and its predecessors? Over the last decade more features are added and the whole thing becomes harder to use and buggier. I don’t like XP rebooting because I do a logical action in 2005 (no Blue Screen yet, knock on wood).

This is a quote from email describing some of the issues that I’ve been trying to find the right person to send to:

""

– waiting for over a minute for intellisense to help type "String" as a return type (…. as String);

– chronic crashes of the VB Compiler only (mostly when building, but lately even when not), which eventually leads to whole VS crash;

– complete confusion of the VB (and C# — the only issue that”s seen in both languages) when referenced dlls are overriten with new files (still same assembly attributes set [Version, FileVersion, etc.]); the only way to solve the problem is to close and re-open the whole

solution;

– when a couple of VS2005 are running (~5), eventually I cannot even save the project because VB compiler says that there’s not enough memory to complete the operation; after looking at task manager, it would show that devenv is using 500mb-1Gb of ram – Are you pre-loading all my projects’ files into memory or something?????

The issues show up in solutions that have 2 projects as well as ones that have 60+ projects in mixed languages.

PF: If you drop me a line through the Contact tab above, I’ll see if we can’t find a place to get your issues looked at. (As a rule of thumb, MSDN’s Product Feedback Center is the place to start, http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/Default.aspx, but it sounds like you’ve got multiple things going on at once.)

I voted on a similar issue on bug tracking site at msdn as well. Just I would not here that I’m having the same issue and I also have a dual core amd 64-bit processor. And the problem does happen more frequently with multiple IDE’s open. In my case 3 one of them having the very large DotNetNuke 3.0 project. The first symptom seems to be that I’m forced to rebuild after making the smallest change. It’s all downhill from there. I love where the product’s going though I just hope you guys get there a little faster.

Someone on the issue log did note that the problem seemed to cease when all of the compiler warnings were resolved and edit and continue was disabled.

mm, want to see the IDE crash? Run your program, view some source code while it’s running. Stop the program, and while its in the process of ‘ending’ your application, select some text and hit CTRL+C or X. Hmm, goodbye work. Solution Corrupted. You have to then answer "Dont Send" to over 58 "we just crashed messages."

Also, I have a Class library named "WizardFoundation" and I inherit a UserControl from one of the classes in that library. Every other time i double click on my UserControl, it says "Cant load Type Loader" with a bunch of meaningless text. I click "build" on the other project, and i can then load the child user control.

This product is fresh installed on a one month old Dell Laptop.

mmm… i think i’m going to move away from this form of "rad" development.

I have 3 vs2005 projects open, the vb compiler crashed 3 times within minutes. The hourglass is now permanent. My page file usage is upto 2.4 GB. I had to use the task manager to kill the process. After the process was killed, the page file usage went down to 853 MB. I’m guessing there is a memory leak

VS2005 is by far the worst MS compiler I’ve used since 1990 in terms of stability. BY FAR. I’ve used it for 4 hours today and had 120 IDE crashes (no joke). When it crashes it tries to send information to MS and that error sending program crashes. Sometimes the crash reporting program gets stuck in a loop and will not close even from TaskManager (closing it causes a new instance to be created). I’ve switched off file indexing and vshost.exe. I am working on a solution with 420 vb files in 20 projects. When I first run it using F5, the IDE does not always copy all the dlls to the target folder. If I "build" it instead it copies more file but misses one project. If I "rebuild" it it copies them all – but I can’t be sure that it updates them all for future builds (as opposed to rebuilds), so I risk working with stale dlls. Just now, after making source code fixes at run time I could not close the application without many many IDE exceptions and errors being displayed. The huge problem for us is the difficulty of returning to VS2003 once we have changed all the source code to work with VS2005.

This really is a case for widespread demands for REFUNDS. As someone says above – if you cannot trust your compiler your whole world falls apart.

Microsoft must be stung for this – sufficiently that they do not dare rest until the problems are resolved. There will always be some with a distorted sense of reality that defend unuseable products but I urge you to ignore them and press on with complaints about this dreadful software until fixes are forthcoming.

For some reason VS2005 will install and work OK on your machine or it will crash every couple of minutes. Those of you lucky enough to be on a machine where it is not crashing every couple of minutes should consider yourselves lucky. And you maybe even in the majority but for those of us in the minority and VS2005 is completely useless. I am actually considering writing all my code using notepad, yes notepad and only using the compiler when I need to compile this way bypassing the entire IDE.

…I actually got fed up with .NET and the VS 2002, 2003, and 2005 IDE junk after having installed V1.0, V1.1, and V2.0, and decided to uninstall them.

…Well, let me tell you, getting rid of these POS’s is a true adventure. The Control Panel / Remove Apps feature in all three cases came back with the terse error message about "Cannot determine uninstall order" and promptly shut down.

…I followed the directions I found on Microsoft.com (which, BTW, are suprisingly complex for just getting rid of something!) and found the process stalled halfway thru, making it impossible to complete (since it would no longer even start at that point). Clearly, .NET was NOT designed to be uninstallable!

…Eventually, lacking any real alternative short of re-building my entire machine, I deleted all .NET related files and folders manually and then ran Registry Mechanic against the system to remove the bad registry entries. Would you be surprised to learn that, overall, there was more than 16,000 registry entries that could be removed by this process(!!!).

…Anyway, the system boots up real fast now, and is noticeably more stable and faster responding.

…I do not know what else Microsoft could have doen to screw up the .NET experience any further. I mean, they’ve only been working on it for how long? 6+ years? and it’s still garbage from the get go?

..The best bet at this point, if you want to produce stable, working software which (compared to .NET equivalent) is LEAN and FAST, use Win31API programming. It will be around for a long time to come….

When are fixes coming? Last week uninstalling my .Net application called for a reboot (unusual) and then XP would not even boot into Safe Mode (something like "volume incorrectly dismounted" error). When I was finally ready to totally reinstall XP it suddenly came back! Later an inocuous edit in IDE suddenly caused total, instantaneous "reset" of XP. Then customer installed my working .Net app, had Framework 2.0 automatically downloaded and program acted strange. When he started Outlook it had a meltdown. Fortunately was able to "restore" his system to state before installing my .Net app. Who can live with software that threatens to destroy business critical installations?

Larry – maybe this gives us better insight as to why Microsoft is not writing anything that runs on .NET. Their new security product is written against COM, as I understand it, and the VS2005 IDE also rests on MS abandonware…why is it that MS keeps on developing against a platform that they tell us is "obsolete"?

From my understanding and experience the problem occurs due to a race condition when working with multiple projects. The hotfix has taken care of most of my issues. I haven’t had another crash since I applied it last month.

BTW, IMO, I still think VB2005 is d’bomb. I’ve been able to drastically reduce the amount of "Cut and Paste" coding that I have to maintain. I also really appreciate the refactoring features. It’s made updating my code much easier. Cheers.

I’m seeing a frequent crash in VS2005 (>5 times/day.) The feedback-reporting mechanism tells me that hotfix 915038 will fix it, but after applying this fix, the problem is as bad as ever.

I’m starting to get worried that SP1 (when it comes) won’t fix the issue, since the App (or MS’s problem-reporting site) doesn’t seem to realize that the fix didn’t work. Is anyone else seeing this behavior?

It isn’t that it seems ‘buggy’ to me but the help system must have been written by a bunch of monkies. Microsoft seriously needs to hire someone to go over vb 2005’s help system! Many of the (local)help topics have links to empty pages and EXTREMELY limited code samples and ALL the online links are for code samples in vb 6! Thank you Microsoft for making vb 6 code incompatable with vb 2005. I’m wondering what that 250+ mb msdn help system actually does??? Yeah, the help system on vb 2005 express is 100% useless! However, The vb 2005 designer system is way better than vb 6. As far as coding with vb 2005, I guess I have a lot to learn. Until then, I’m forced to stick with vb 6 🙁

I loved .NET 2002. Solid. So much better than early VB. Didn’t work much with 2003. 2005 has some great improvements but is much buggier for me (that’s why I’m reading everyone’s comments.) VS is blowing up pretty much every day and I’m told to contact MS support which may or may not fix it for free.

Help is generally worthless. Few examples and those are generally not usable. I use Google for my help system.

I began to wonder when I found an easy to detect bug in the MonthCalendar control (select a range of dates. Change current month and problem remains.) Why wasn’t this obvious bug found and fixed before final release? Made me wonder about MS’s testing procedures. Had they given me the control to test I would have easily found the bug within 5 minutes.

Started useing VS2005 recently and found the same bug as in Vs2003. If you shut down the computer while VS is open the solution is corrupted and when you next open it some projects may be missing. VS2005 had an extra one. Some project files were missing from some projects.

VB6 was stable. It might not have had all the bells and whistles of VB 2005, but it did what you asked it to do and quickly. The IDE was clean and easy to use, and even if you had to load 5000 records in the IDE, it did it fast. This is not the case in vb 2005.

Not only that but vb 2005 is not a new version of vb6. It is nearly impossible to convert large applications over to vb2005 and there are alot of large programs built on vb6. The vb 2005 information relys heavily on the SQL express server, and very little information is given about connecting to an access backend oledb provider.

We only moved to VS2005 (VB) six months ago!. We are a business using VB for internal systems and until service pack one was releases the IDE was useless (try using it with multiple monitors).

VS2003 was a Steep learning curve but after a while we grew to like it. There was no real reason for us to move to VS2005 (we only wrote thick client stuff) NO Web!.

VS2005 has been a big dissapointment. Every member of the team has the same problems with our main application (VB, 16 projects, thousands on files) when we close the IDE it usually crashes, Not always but mostly.

Also the IDE will crash randomly when editing code. Looks like it might be an issue with the background re-compile.

The other issue, as other people have said is trying to view the designer. This was SLOW… in VS2003, in VS2005 it is practically unusable. and it is not unknown for the ide to NOT display the form in the designer but display an error message which then requires a full re-compile of the project to fix.

Not sure if the slowness of the IDE is not related to the fact that all forms are inherited from customer base forms and we have extended the functionality of the textbox, combo (and other) controls.

The Microsoft Comunity forums just have never worked properly, they just seem to hang if you want to view a specific item.

I would rather wait ANOTHER year or TWO for Microsoft to build a robust and reliable product than ship a half finished, slow and buggy one.

What is the point of new features if the product itself is unreliable.

I just put in VS2005 a few weeks ago as I needed it for a CE/Mobile project. On a completely clean and patched Thinkpad it took me three installs before I actually got it working enough to develop with. The ‘fix’ for one of the issues was to uninstall the compact framework that comes with VS2005 and install a different one. Still couldn’t launch a new VB/Mobile project without a "Failed to start compiler" message. In the end I found I am unable to have .NET 3 installed in any fashion for it to function. Even now if I put in .NET 3, even through Windows Update, VS2005 stops working.